ICANN has announced who will act as its Board Directors for the next three years. Meeting all expectations, its independent Nominating Committee has chosen people already well known and connected within the ICANN community amid several executives from multi-national corporations that help fund ICANN.

The influential CTIA - Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association - is focusing its considerable influence on people who are dragging their feet on the so-called E-911 bill - which mandates that all 911 emergency calls should carry accurate details of where the caller is.

Bluetooth must become much easier to use if consumers are to adopt the wireless connectivity technology - that's a belief widely held by members of the Bluetooth community. Now Sony reckons it has the solution.

If you're as tired as we are of looking at the heavens with boggle-eyed disbelief that yet another half-wit has been taken to the cleaners by Nigerian advance fee fraudsters, then take heart at the following story.

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is everywhere, writes Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. It's the basis of the new middleware, Web Services. It's the format of choice for both Microsoft's new Office products and .NET services. And every Java vendor worth their salt is working with it. Indeed, IBM's program director for emerging e-business standards group, Steve Holbrook, says, "XML is the most important protocol since HTML."

Finnish mobile phone developer MyOrigo has launched what it claims is "an entirely new concept" for mobile phones: a book-like user interface that can also be controlled by the motion of the user's hand.

London-based security consultancy Defcom Information Security has been bought out of administration by US managed security services firm NetSec. Financial terms of the deal, announced today, were not disclosed.

'Be superior in the anti-bacterial going out bad-smelling performance'

Owners of Apple's 12in PowerBook G4 who've become fed up with the notebook's ability to get very hot indeed in the region of its hard drive - underneath the left-hand side of the wrist rest - may be interested in this little offering from online retailer NewColorShop.com.

PlayStation Portable (PSP) is not the first time that Sony has developed a handheld gaming system, it has emerged, with a Japanese business publication revealing details of the company's one-time plans to release a portable platform in 2000.

Oracle has upped its hostile offer for Peoplesoft to $19.50 a share. This values its target at $6.3bn, a whopping $1.2bn higher than its opening shot and a premium of 29 per cent higher than Peoplesoft's closing share price on the day before its bid was announced.

Oracle and Peoplesoft may be locked in mortal combat, but they have something in common. Both saw their share of the Worldwide Enterprise Resource Planning market fall in 2002. Worse, their market share fell against a backdrop of a sector decline of nine per cent in new license revenues from $5.5bn to $5bn for the year. The market would have suffered an even more serious decline, except for the strength of the euro, Gartner says.

Fujitsu Siemens has won a £2 million contract to supply the University of Manchester with servers as part of an ambitious server consolidation project ahead of a major expansion to the uni's student population next year.

The Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Orrin Hatch (Republican, Utah), thinks it would be a fabulous idea if copyright owners could remotely destroy computers that contain pirated material, the Associated Press reports.

Storage infrastructures are about to get a whole lot more complex, according to a report from the Yankee Group. It fingers regulatory and compliance pressures as the main drivers behind the adoption of a multi-layered approach to storage, with different types of storage offering different cost per GB, access speed, quality of service, and so on.